martes, 20 de diciembre de 2016

As always for that time of the year, Adele
had to out on her best clothes when working. It wasn’t really well seen if the
hostess of a very prestigious restaurant dressed in any kind of clothing. She
had to have some nice dresses for every single type of occasion, as she was the
face of the hotel on the evening people had chosen to come. She represented
everything for them and was the go to person if anything were to happen during
one of the many dinners the hotel hosted all along the year. It was always vey
busy, a successful business.

Christmas time was especially hard on the
hotel workers. For example, Adele had to wake up very early in the morning
every single day leading to Christmas. For a week or so, she would have to put
on her best coat to resist the fierceness of the weather and also because she
really needed to get warm as soon as she arrived at the hotel as many things
had to be checked. And in Christmas this was done in the most exact way, as
everything had to be in line with perfection that night, as they always
promised their guests the most lavish dinner ever.

The kitchen staff consisted of several men and
only a few women. There weren’t many women trying to breakout in the business
and she was only closely related to everything they did on the actual
restaurant. Adele was only a hostess and she would never be able to grow much
more than that in her line of work. It all depended on very well paid jobs in
certain events and parties, which he had hosted occasionally but not as
prolifically as the events held on the hotel. There, she knew she was prepared
to resist anything and everything.

In the days leading to the Christmas dinner,
the menu was checked several times and many testing lines were done. It was
Adele’s job to taste everything and determine if she needed to change something
in order to have some more time or make it a more successful menu. Two days
before, she even thought it was going to be necessary to change the dessert
because it wasn’t very well achieved but the person in charge of confectionery
convinced her that he could make it more attractive with some superficial
design.

The day before Christmas he presented his
corrections and he was lucky enough to be congratulated by Adele. The rest of
the dishes were done and they only needed to cook them early on Christmas Eve
in order for everything to be on point for the dinner. Many cases of wine were
ordered from around the world, as well as many other alcoholic beverages. They
also bought lots of cheese for after dinner and had to go to the market to buy
the best and most fresh products in order to cook everything they needed for
the menu.

The night before the party, Adele was not able
to sleep properly. She had gone to bed intentionally early but it didn’t work
out at all. Not only was she worried about the dinner and the results the hotel
was going to get with it but she also doubted her personal capacity to resist
everything she was going to be held against. After all, the dinner was
practically her show and if anything went wrong, it was her skill which had to
come to work in order to fix whatever that needed to be fixed. All those
thoughts did not let her sleep for a minute.

When she arrived in the hotel, she checked
every produce than had arrived and gathered the staff around her in order to
tell them a few things before beginning. Not only the kitchen staff was present
during the speech but also the rest of the hotel employees, as most guest were
going to stay the night after dinner. Adele asked for everyone to do their
best, to make it an experience that none of them could be able to replicate
anywhere else. They needed to make that night one of the most special nights
ever for every single guest.

Rooms began to be cleaned and final details
were being put on all over the hotel as flowers in every floor to make it smell
divine. The kitchen went into full gear from very early in the morning, as they
also had to cook for the rest of the guests in the hotel that were not going to
participate in the dinner. It seemed to be chaos in the kitchens but the chef,
and to a lesser extent Adele, knew how to make it all seem so peaceful, to
always have a certain order that may not be obvious but with which every single
person can work with to achieve the goals.

Adele also had to check every single bedroom
in order to personally see that the other workers had done a good job. She had
to check first the ones where people had the intention to arrive earlier and
then she moved on to the rest, checking for the bed to be perfectly done and
for the furniture not to have a spec of dust. She also checked the bathroom, as
that had always been very popular after dinner. People loved to have a bubble
bath at some point so it was better to be prepared. Anything people wanted
while staying had to become a reality.

As she was checking the top floor, Adele
received word that something had gone wrong with the dessert. Apparently the
ingredients had been on a refrigerator that wasn’t working very well and they
had become useless. Many melted and others were simply not the quality needed
for the dessert. Adele ordered for all of that to be stored away and demanded
the pastry chef and the confectionery guy to come up with something very fast
as her customers couldn’t go without desert.

Dinner was scheduled for nine o’clock at
night. At seven, some of the guests begun to arrive and the desserts were not
really done yet. Adele was very pleased to escort the first couple upstairs and
tell them everything about the dinner, the usage of the bathroom and of the
rest of the hotels features such as the swimming pool, the steam room and the
spa, among others. She was lucky enough to check that room beforehand because
she had discover dirty towels in the bathroom, so she changed that before
anyone noticed.

She didn’t join everyone to their room as, at
eight o’clock, many more people started to arrive and she certainly didn’t have
any time to waste. She used that moment to go back to the kitchen and see what
they had come up with for dessert. As expected, they weren’t having many ideas.
The people in charge were not as imaginative as they needed to be and they were
really relaying on clichés to make a proper dessert. But the same old pastries
and ice cream were not nearly goo enough for Christmas dinner. It would be an
insult to the guests!

Adele decided to come up herself with a new
dessert. She knew they didn’t have much time, so she decided to reuse some of
the ingredients they had from past parties. She decided to reuse the chocolate
balls that melted when hot chocolate was poured on top of them. She decided to
change the liquid chocolate for caramel and told the staff to come up with some
sort of truffle at the center of the ball, in order for people to have a nice
surprise when having their last dish. She put everyone to work and told them
they had minutes to come up with a tasting plate.

She decided to visit the lobby as they
prepared, in order to let in the first guests. It was decided they should wait
at the lounge bar, as she preferred to know first if the dessert was a go or
no. She returned to the kitchen briefly to taste her idea and approved it when
she realized it was good enough. Half of the kitchen staff had to help do all
the desert plates needed for the evening. Adele left them again in order to
open the restaurant and let everyone inside. The music had been carefully
chosen as well as the design of the menus.

The dinner started with applause when the
guests saw their first plate, which was absolutely gorgeous. Then came the
other dishes and finally the dessert. People didn’t say much about it but, when
coming out of the restaurant, they praised the idea for being “simple but
effective”. As some guests headed towards their beds and other towards the bar,
Adele went to the kitchens and declared the night a complete success. She wasn’t
going to sleep much that night either but at least she wasn’t going to be
worried.

miércoles, 17 de febrero de 2016

Paul pulled the potato plant and some dirt
feel into the ground, with a beautiful soft noise. The potatoes had grown
decently big and so had the rest of the food he had grown in the back garden.
From there, he could not see anyone else, only the shadow formed by the house
and the hills that created several ups and downs that got to the sea itself.
But the sea was very far and in this inland territory only the cold wind that
remained from the past winter swept the land, as if washing away any impurities
in this world.

He pulled a basket, put the potatoes inside
with other fresh products, and took it inside the house. There he washed them
carefully, cut off the parts that didn’t have any use and then started cooking.
Adam got there just in time with meat from the market on the other side of the
valley. He seemed tired so Paul told him to sit down and relax as he finished
preparing dinner. Outside, the sun had already left the sky and the night was
dark and silent except for the snoring of Adam who had fallen asleep in the
couch.

Paul wasn’t in a hurry with dinner, especially
because he had to prepare everything enough time to kill all the bacteria and
because the meat was thick and took some time to cook. When he was finally
done, Paul went to Adam and softly kissed his forehead. As if it had happened
in a fairy tale, Adam opened his eyes and smiled because of the kiss and
because of the fabulous smell invading the small house.

They sat down to eat some delicious steamed
vegetables with thick slices of fried meat and a side of mash potatoes that
tasted different from the one they had known in their childhood but it was
still good. As he always did, Adam grabbed one of Paul’s hands, his left one,
and kept on eating like that all night. It was something he had started doing
when they first moved there and it was just a way to ensure they would never be
separated. Adam was extremely serious about it and once they had a fight over
that, because Paul had told him that he couldn’t eat properly like that. That night,
they didn’t sleep together.

But this time it was different. When dinner
was done, Adam helped Paul wash the dishes and went to bed at the same time.
They took off their clothes; each one tired of their day, and just hugged to
sleep. But differently than all other nights, a horrible sound woke them up in
the middle of the night. It was a sound coming from a machine and there were
not many machines in this region. They felt the ground shake, which was what
woke them up, and the horrible sound of a plane going over the valley. They had
heard planes before but this one different, much worse, as if the plane was a
horrible beast of some kind. They held each other after the sound had finished,
thinking of what it could mean.

The next day in town, Adam talked to many
villagers and even to some fisherman that travelled daily to the coast and the
port to sell their products. Apparently most people had heard the same thing
and everyone had been awaken by it.The
first thing they said was that the country was neutral, at least officially,
and that they didn’t allow one of the factions to use their territory to do
nothing. So either the plane came all the way from one of the continents or
their government had just betrayed the neutrality that had been their main
characteristic for so long.

The truth was that no one really saw where the plane came from or where did it go but it was flying really low. The
following days some more things happened: many witnesses saw red lights, balls
of fire, over the ocean but very far at the same time. It was like a weird
light show and there was a sound with it but because of he distance it was hard
to say what it was. Then some farmers found tank tracks in their fields but
they had never heard any of them passing around. Actually, the army didn’t even
have tanks or planes or anything.

Adam decided they should keep living their
normal lives, not minding a lot about these events. Or at least that’s what he
told Paul. But at nights he would often wake up sweating from nightmares
involving tortures and lights like the ones over the ocean and Paul would ask
what was wrong and Adam wouldn’t say. They fought over it a couple of times but
mostly they just held each other and tried to be supportive and close, because
anything could happen.

The explanation to everything was written in
pieces of paper that had been distributed all over the country. Their nation
had accepted the use of several bases by one of the factions and they would use
the country to fight a battle against the other faction, to finally crush them
for good. Their land would not be caught under fire, only been use as a
previous layover for every plane, boat and other war vehicle, even tanks that
did target practice in a wasteland north of the valley. That explained the
explosions many people had heard.

So the war had never ended and it was
apparently on an important stage, on a decisive point that made even change the
face of the world. This secretly excited Adam because even after so many years
away from the fight, he was still eager to fight for what he believed and for
what he had done so much so many years ago. But Paul just didn’t address the
subject. The only thing he said was that if they all wanted to keep on killing
themselves, it was fine by him but he didn’t wanted nothing to do with any of
that. He didn’t want the war to come to the village and that was it.

Adam didn’t told Paul but he started to have
meetings with many people from the region and they were already discussing if
they should also join the fight and how would they do it and why. They had the
tremendous chance that the authorities were so busy these days that a meeting
in a farm wasn’t important enough for them to attend and tear apart. They would
have done it but now the government was using all the resources it had to make
their “guests” feel at home. Everyone knew the situation was a disguised
invasion and that their country had kneeled without even the chance of
fighting.

Paul kept to himself. He started concentrating
only in his garden and in fishing in the lake nearby and doing all these things
to make his home the best part of the world. He would share with some villagers
his discoveries about how diets could be better so to keep everyone strong
during the winter and during the summer too. And what he started to do was to
take long walks, always when Adam was about to come back from his meeting in
town. He knew he would want to tell someone about it and he just didn’t want to
hear about it. He’d rather have their neighbors or their dog help Adam with
that.

Their relationship became very tense and that
was very strange for both of them as they had never been in such tension. They
had been living together for over three years now, year in which they had build
a home together and had found the other to be that person they wanted in their
lives forever. They had been through hell and back to get to that valley and
have everything that they enjoyed in their daily lives. They had fought
together and suffered together and now it was supposed to be a time of peace
for them, even if the world was falling apart.

But the sense of responsibility in Adam was
too strong. So one day he followed Paul to the lake, where he went to take a
walk and get away from everything, and tried to talk to him. He told Paul,
almost yelling, that he needed to go back to the fight because he felt he had
to finish what he started, he had to make the west faction pay for what they
had done back home, for what they had allowed to happen to them and to the
world. They were destroying everything everyone held dear and the world would
never be the same if someone didn’t stop them.

Paul answered that he didn’t wanted the world
to go back to what it was. He didn’t want the past because he hated it. He
reminded Adam than in that glorious past they would have been hanged if they
dared to live together, in that past people were also deprived of everything
and lacked so much. Fighting for revenge wouldn’t change anything, no matter
who won or how they won. Everything was always going to be the same, war or
not.

For a whole week they didn’t talk to each
other and Adam even chose to sleep in the couch. But they loved each other. They
couldn’t do that for long because it tore them apart slowly. The war raged on
and they were trapped in the middle of the fire, not knowing what to do or
where to go.

domingo, 1 de febrero de 2015

It felt stupid, just waiting there as if I
had nothing better to do. Besides the person that had to give me the documents
was late so if the job seemed easy at one point, had now became annoying beyond
imagination. I had drunk a cup of coffee and was tempted to leave after waiting
for fifteen minutes. Just then, a man in a white coat arrived. It was
impossible to miss her: her coat was made of fur, fluffy and beautiful and,
beneath it; she wore a red dress with a deep cleavage.

What kind of agent was this? I had never seen
someone so obvious! Or maybe it was her technique, to look completely out of
place in that park. She waved her hand at me and I just nodded. She sat down
next to me and opened her purse. Silly me, I thought she was going to extract
the papers from there but I was wrong. She grabbed a lipstick and a small
mirror and began a routine she must have done twenty times a day, at least.
When she was done, she put her things inside the purse and looked at me.

-Girl’s got to be ready at all times.

I
stared at her, confused. I was sure she was the one I had to talk too but she didn’t
seem to know what she had to do.

I
cleared my voice and asked, looking at a family pass by:

-Do
you…

-I’m hungry. I haven’t had one rice
for hour. That plane food… I don’t know how someone eats that. I couldn’t
afford first class this time so I was under deep stress for all those hours.
You know those flights.

She
clearly thought she was making sense. Or it may have been the fact that she was
a very good actress because I had no idea what she was talking about. She
glanced around, apparently looking for something.

-There
must be a nice restaurant in this area… Town Hall is just across the street,
right?

-Yeah…

I
stood up and offered to take her to lunch. She was thrilled by the prospect of
eating and didn’t shut up in the long walk to a restaurant. Seoul was a
beautiful city and I wanted to see it just as much as her but I considered myself
on duty. The thing was Agent Volnal appeared to have a very different attitude
towards her duties. She pointed and practically screamed at everything she
thought was odd or peculiar. Being a little obvious wasn’t bad but this was a
bit too much.

We finally got to a nice little restaurant.
They seem to serve every traditional dish but also other popular Asian foods
like sushi or fired rice. Ms. Volnal took her coat off when seating at a table
by the wall and I noticed how physical she was. What I mean is she looked like
a person who goes to the gym pretty often.

-Ms.…

-Mirna. – She said, barely moving her
lips or her eyes from the menu.

There was a long silence in which both of us
decided what to order. I wasn’t feeling too hungry myself but I preferred to go
along. This was too strange to leave it at that and, most importantly, people
were expecting me to have important documents by nightfall.

-I
think I might have the sashimi. I love fish.

-Good.

-What
are you having? Maybe we can order like many small things and then share. What
do you think?

-Sure, sounds fun.

It didn’t sound fun because time was scarce
and I had been advised not to stroll for too long away from the hotel or the
airport. No one wanted me to be caught by the enemy or by some foreign police.
But I needed the documents and I was sure she had them.

-We would like a sashimi plate, and
some kimchi and the “kaboom” sushi you list here. And…Let’s see… What else you
want honey?

For a moment, I was too shocked by the fact
she had called me honey. But then I recuperated and ordered two more plates of
traditional meat and vegetables. She looked around the restaurant, admiring
every single piece of the décor. I, for one, was starting to get worried. Even
if we decided to eat fast, which I wouldn’t bet on, nightfall would catch us
there, in a small restaurant in downtown Seoul. I had to have the info fast in
order to travel early the next day.

-Have you ever been in Asia before? –
She asked.

I jumped a bit, being to immerse in my own
thoughts.

-Yeah,
I’ve gone to Japan and the Philippines. And have been in Singapore too.

-I went to Thailand last year.
Phuket. You know, the place where the tsunami happened. You wouldn’t believe;
they have all working and it’s so beautiful. You should totally go there.

As a matter of fact, I had always wanted to be
there. And then the waitress came and I realized I was really hungry.

As it happens, Mirna was a delight. For the
following three hours I absolutely forgot whom I was or what it was that I was
doing. We talked about everything single shallow and silly thing. We laughed at
some celebrity news and also about some funny things that had happened to us in
the past.

We never said a single word about or jobs. It
seemed to me we didn’t need to talk about that, seeing we worked so often and
for so many hours and in so many places.

-God,
this is delicious! – Said Mirna, having some kimchi.

-I
know, right? Who would think a bunch of stewed cabbage tasted this good?

-It’s
crazy. Although, I’m more of a sweet tooth.

-Really?

-I just love chocolate. Any guy who
gives me a box of chocolates, has a very good shot at being my husband.

I
laughed. I had never felt so at ease with a woman, at least not too recently.

-You know, there’s a store in my
hotel. They sell these Belgian chocolates. Maybe we could have some.

And
we did. After eating, we took the subway together, still laughing and pointing
and smiling and talking. We must have looked as best friends all the way to the
hotel. There, on the ground level, there was a large chocolate store. They even
created custom made orders. Mirna and I tasted a whole bunch and we each came
out with a big box for our journey back home.

Then,
it came the moment to say goodbye. I had forgotten all about work until, when
she kissed my cheek and hugged me goodbye; she put her lips near my ear and
said:

-Bathroom wastebasket.

We
smiled and each other and, as she walked towards the subway station, I entered
the hotel and went up to my room. I didn’t even close the main door to check in
the bathroom. As she had said, there was a small flash drive beneath the
plastic bag in the wastebasket. And attached to it, there was a note: